So what is SLS, and how can it be used to change settings? I've talked about it a lot, but what are the practical applications? This 5-minute screencast should give you a general idea: I go through the process of writing a quick SLS XML definition to show it all in action, from a developer point of view.

• Theora, low quality
• YouTube (H.264/WebM), high quality

The complete documentation and reference to SLS is available here and under /usr/share/doc/jobservice. If you're interested at all in using SLS for a service, I highly recommend you check that page out, even if just to skim.

If you maintain or help maintain any system service, be it a media streamer or a web server, do get in touch and we'll see how jobservice and SLS can apply to your service.

Google Summer of Code ends this week, which indirectly means that jobs-admin is now ready for testing! Interested testers need only to add a PPA and install a package to begin. Within a few days the packages will be available in maverick universe.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jpeddicord/jobs
sudo apt-get install jobs-admin

Essentially, jobs-admin is a replacement for services-admin. Upstart support has been added, along with the ability to change settings on individual services. For example, you can tweak simple firewall settings or enable and disable Apport.

jobs-admin may be launched from the terminal, or can be found under System > Administration > System Jobs. We've hidden most jobs/services that are essential to your system, so ideally you shouldn't be able to break anything even if you wanted to. With that in mind, feel free to give it all a stress test. Shut off jobs you don't want, and change the settings of others. By testing this you'll also be testing jobservice, the daemon which powers it all. Think of jobservice as a "PackageKit" for system services: it's a generic backend to manage jobs no matter whether a system is running Upstart or a basic System V setup.

Bugs can be reported on Launchpad: http://bugs.launchpad.net/jobsadmin

We're also open for translating:

• https://translations.launchpad.net/jobsadmin - for most UI elements
• https://translations.launchpad.net/jobservice - for job settings

Any and all feedback is welcome. We'll have a bugfix release in the next few weeks. I won't be responding to reports or feedback until August 16 (Monday), however.

For Maverick, you'll be able to install jobs-admin and have easy access to your system's services. The PPA will be maintained so Lucid users aren't left out. We're hoping to make this the de-facto utility (and framework) for managing services and jobs, and hopefully you'll see this in-place as the replacement for the missed services-admin in 11.04. I'll be working on getting these packages into Debian as well.

It's been a while. Well, in internet years, anyway. I've made a lot of updates to jobservice and jobs-admin in the past few weeks:

• service-level settings works
• sporting a new UI
• speed improvements
• tons of bug fixes

I'll let the video do the talking (click the image):

Shoutout to Matthew Paul Thomas who provided the feedback for this new interface. :)

You can see service-level settings in action in the video. It's shown for apport and ufw. There's been a little confusion as to what this actually is, so here's a fancy diagram:

When you click that shiny "Job Settings" button, a lot of things happen. jobs-admin tells jobservice that settings were requested. jobservice then asks each of the backends if they have any settings on that particular service. Then it goes to SLS, which first looks up an XML file, and then uses that data to parse the actual configuration files. This is all compiled together by jobservice and sent back over DBus to jobs-admin, which renders some GTK widgets with this information. When a setting is changed, jobs-admin sends the changes to jobservice, which sends it back to wherever it came from.

SLS doesn't have anything to do with services themselves, just their configuration. When you start, stop, or look up information on a job, that is all handled by the appropriate backend.

Now, there is a PPA somewhere with these changes to play around with, but I won't link it here (though it isn't hard to find). I'd like to get more things together before there's a call for testing, but I won't prevent anyone from using it.

Also: I upgraded this site to Movable Type 5. Let me know if you notice anything broken. :)